Posts by Issue

This essay, by Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese, is an immediate response to two recent events, the release of the findings into the death in custody of Ms Dhu in the week before Christmas 2016, and the death in custody of Manus Island refugee, Faysal Ishak Ahmed, on Christmas Eve. As in the case of other deaths in the custody of the state, these were not sudden and unforeseeable events, but the outcome of a range of violent practices—denial, delay, accusations of malingering, verbal and physical abuse, misdiagnosis, non-diagnosis, active neglect—by the state and its agents,... Read More

In a recently published report by Amnesty International, it has been discovered that at least 17,723 people have died in custody in Syrian prisons since March 2011. This, the article states, is around “300 deaths per month” - not counting the much larger reality of all those people who have been abducted or are “missing”.

Reports of torture in the Saydnaya Military Prison vary from instances of prisoners being kept in cells with dead bodies, or detained in cells where women were raped right next to them by armed guards. Personal accounts of survivors fill the article with details... Read More

In this article, a journalist from Kashmir, Gowhar Geelani, relays his experiences in the currently ongoing curfew placed in Kashmir. It has been over 7 weeks since the strict curfew was placed, and the situation appears to be dire, with fear as the general norm in lifestyle.

On 9th July, young activist and leader of an anti-Indian occupation movement, Burhan Wani was killed by Indian security forces. This led to civil unrest and violence between civilian protestors and the Indian military, which resulted in a curfew being placed on the region... Read More

“Assaults, sexual abuse, self-harm, inhuman conditions – over 2,000 newly leaked reports paint a sordid picture of Australia’s offshore refugee detention operations on the Pacific island of Nauru.” By forcibly transferring refugees and people seeking asylum to Nauru, detaining them for prolonged periods in inhuman conditions, denying them appropriate medical care, and in other ways structuring its operations so that many experience a serious degradation of their mental health, the Australian government has violated the rights to be free from torture and other ill-treatment, and from... Read More

The article describes the enforced disappearance of 43 students in the Mexican State of Guerrero, in 2014. The Mexican government has failed to investigate the case and providing a just answer to the student's families. Only one of the students has been found and the rest are still missing. This case lights out many other disappearances in Mexico that the State hasn't resolve. The corruption and incompetence of the government don't allow justice to be done and human violations to be repair.

Obama’s recent efforts to restore U.S.-Cuba relations have been called out for neglecting American values and ideals.

Human Rights issues in Cuba have only been growing worse; more Cubans have been leaving the island. There have been 8,600 detention and arrests in 2015, with 2,500 in the first two months of 2016, a “315 percent increase from five years ago” (Source).

Dr, Oscar Elias Biscet, one of the most well-known human rights activists of Cuba, who has received a U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, argues that Obama’s efforts “undermined... Read More

After an undercover investigation into American private prisons, Mother Jones journalist Shane Bauer reported on what he saw in the Correction Corporation of America's (CCA's) Winn Correctional Center. He found that among other issues, short staffing led to a host of problems, forcing the prison to cut services for recreation, mental health, reintegration, and even basic maintenance and sanitation. Bauer's article implies that prison staff were simply incapable of doing their jobs with the resources given them. As his article points out, CCA trained its cadets for just one-third of the... Read More

On Wednesday, the State Department released its annual report of human rights around the globe. The report claims that human rights conditions are worsening in countries such as Russia and China, where repression of dissidents, journalists, protestors, and religious minorities is rising. The State Department also emphasized the critical nature of the human rights situation in the Middle East, pointing to Syria as an example of the consequences of human rights violations.

Colleen Walsh’s write-up “The costs of inequality: A goal of justice, a reality of unfairness,” (fifth in a series on inequality) published in Harvard Gazette is an eye-opener in that it has exposed the US criminal justice system imprisoning millions of people of which the black population occupies a stark portion. According the article, the US puts 2.2 million people behind the bar, which is more than any other country in the world. More appalling, nearly one-fourth of the world’s jailbirds are detained in American prison. Scholars and pundits dealing with law and human rights have found... Read More